


Wilderness of Mirrors

by thealexandriaarchives



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Abysmal Flirting, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dirty Talk, Eggsy May Get Banged Up Though, First Time, Fluff, Harry Hart is a Smug Fucker, M/M, Slow Burn, Survival Training, Wilderness, no animals were harmed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 20:27:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3663876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealexandriaarchives/pseuds/thealexandriaarchives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kingsman Survival Training. Supposedly five days of trying not to freeze to death in the middle of fucking nowhere while your proposing agent watches smugly with a thermos. But of course none of these tests are as simple as they claim to be.</p><p>Or: The One Where Eggsy Doesn't Get Sleeping Bag Sex</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wilderness of Mirrors

 

**Wilderness of Mirrors:**

A phrase still used today in counterintelligence circles to denote the feelings of paranoia that sometimes develop in the byzantine business of spyhunting, when one is no longer able to distinguish what is real and what is illusion.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy struggles to draw slow, even breaths and remain calm as he crawls his way back to consciousness, the increasingly familiar cotton in his mouth and sloshing around his skull telling him he’s been drugged again. His hands and feet are bound behind his back, and panic briefly sets in when he realizes he’s blind, before figuring out part of the pressure around his temples and eyes is a blindfold, and not just the roofie cocktail. The floor beneath him is textured, cool metal, and pulsing with engine vibrations. The distinctive noise of a helicopter blade roars above him, and a voice cuts through it sharply to the earpiece someone had been kind enough to insert for him.

“Welcome back, candidates,” Merlin greets with his usual smug deadpan. “Today is the first of your five days of wilderness survival testing.”

Eggsy senses movement to his left, and reaches out tentatively towards it as best he can. He knocks into a thin hand twisting in identical ropes to his, and nearly has his finger snapped backwards for it. That was Roxy fine then. More cautiously he bumps her with his shoulder, and finds an arm to tap a quick message out.

_‘OK?’_

Some of the tension goes out of the body next to him, and he feels a tap in the affirmative on his thigh.

_‘Turn Over’_

Catching her drift, Eggsy does his best to twist around so Rox can reach the knots binding his feet as he blindly picks at the ones around her wrists. Merlin continues to speak in his ear.

“Your assignment is simple. Assess the area, and locate your target. Once you have found them, you will need to keep both you and your target alive for the full five days. After you have located your target, you are to locate your handler. They will be watching you for the duration of the test.”

The ropes around Eggsy’s ankles give while he’s still barely managed to loosen one of knots on Roxy’s wrists. Her fingers start seeking out the matching knots along his bonds, but her wriggling makes his efforts even more useless, and he pulls away.

_‘Still’_

“Your handler has a beacon that must be activated in order for the chopper to pick you up on the fifth day.”

He finally picks the last knot loose, and Roxy’s hands shoot down to start undoing her legs. Fair cop, she’s clearly much quicker at this than he is.

“If you, or your target are killed, seriously injured, or develop hypothermia, you go home. If you fail to claim the beacon from your handler and activate it in time, you go home.”

Two pairs of strong hands in hatch gloves descend on Eggsy at the same time, wrapping around his ankles and still bound wrists and roughly hoisting him into the air. He kicks and thrashes automatically, strings of creative cursing drowned out by the noise of the chopper ahead. He can hear Roxy doing the same below him, and unintelligible but annoyed mutterings from whoever’s in charge of his wrists.

The earpiece chimes in again. “Eggsy, you’re up first.”

Eggsy doesn’t have time to fully appreciate the thought that Merlin’s a smug git, because then the hands gripping him _let go_ and he’s _falling_.

The sound of the chopper is replaced by stinging cold and roaring wind, and he’s probably torn the skin around his wrists bloody with the force of his writhing, but it wouldn’t matter anyway because he doesn’t have a parachute for _real_ this time, this is how they’re going to finally kill him, but he can’t even _see-_

He hits the ground.

He’s still alive. His whole body is screaming out in pain from the jarring impact, and he’s half sure he’s dislocated his left shoulder somewhere in the process, and he’s pretty sure if that’s what’s drawing his attention he’s neither in shock nor dying in the next thirty seconds.

The ground beneath him is hard but wet, and he can still hear wind and the helicopter about a dozen feet above him. Straining over the blood still pounding in his ears, he can make out shouts and shrieks above him.

Shit, Rox. She’ll be on her own for this one then.

The engine moves off and the wind biting at his face dies down he’s able to make out a final noise from his ear.

A low, fucking chuckle.

Movement of any kind sounds like just about the most painful thing he can imagine right now, but he grits his teeth and manages to bite out a single word.

“Arsehole.”

“Watch it, boy,” Merlin warns. “Or the next time you get thrown out of one of my planes will have a very different ending.”

He groans in acknowledgement, and tries to figure out a means of sitting up that won’t cause even the black of the blindfold to swim before his eyes.

“I’m switching your earpiece over to your handler for the mission. Good luck. We’ll be back for whatever’s left of you in five days.”

There’s silence from the earpiece, and Eggsy figures whoever’s on the other end now doesn’t feel like the courtesy of introducing themselves. Whatever.

It feels like hours, but it’s probably about ten minutes before he’s able to rid himself of the last of his ropes, immediately hissing in pain as his busted shoulder shifts automatically. Biting down on the inside of his cheek, he wrenches it back into place and manages not to shout as he does.

That particular shoulder may have gone out for the first time during a botched barre routine when he was 9, but fuckin’ hell if that ever got any less painful.

Breathing deeply and sitting up, he pulls off the blindfold and blinks rapidly to adjust his eyes to the light.

He’s sitting in the middle of a tiny valley, surrounded by craggy hills. No trees or plants stand higher than a foot off the ground, and he can’t see any signs of animal life. It’s cold, wet, overcast, and fucking miserable looking.

“Scotland, then?” he mutters. He has no way of telling how long they’d been drugged, but if they were still in the U.K. this fuckin’ wasteland only resonated with one place he knew of.

Plus he was still feeling a bit pissy at Merlin at the moment. He sniffs, and nods to himself.

“Definitely fucking Scotland.”

Climbing stiffly to his feet, he stretches out the rest of his sore muscles and takes stock.

No immediate threats apparent, and nowhere for them to hide.

Despite his body protesting the dangers of drug use and being _chucked out a fucking helicopter_ he seems to have no visible injuries other than his shoulder and some truly fuckin’ spectacular bruises round his wrists.

He’d been stripped and redressed while he was asleep, and though that’s a less than pleasant fucking thought, he’s glad. Gone is the standard candidate jumpsuit, replaced with warm wool trousers, and lightweight boots with decent tread. His shirt remains, but a thick navy blue sweater now tops it.

Checking his pockets, he finds a collapsible one liter metal canteen (empty, of course), a folded thick plastic sheet that looks to be a few square meters, and a small collapsible pocket knife.

“Well that woulda been nice t’ have known about twenty minutes ago,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes at himself.

No food, compass, or information on his target or handler. Aces.

The sun, as best as he can fucking find it behind the omnipresent grey, seems about two hours from setting. It’s fucking freezing already, he is not looking forward to a week of January nights.

Tucking the pocketknife up his right sleeve, and the mostly shredded ropes from his wrists in his pocket, he starts picking his way up the side of the nearest hill, keeping an eye out for ice patches, and clearly non-indigenous plant or animal life. Also trip-wires. Or explosives. Or drugged morning oatmeal.

It’s not that he doesn’t trust Kingsman at this point. It’s just that he’s yet to have a field mission and they’re already instilling the standard-issue paranoia.

He reaches the top of the hill and drops to the ground, scanning the horizon, running objectives in his head. Find his target, find shelter before dark, find water, find his handler.

There’s still no signs of civilization from the top of his hill, but there’s a little less fuck-all nothing. A stream runs due east, and a few trees have actually managed to cling roots to the soil over there. It’s the best place to make camp for the night. It’s also completely in the open and a horrible spot to defend.

The only other landmarks that draw his attention are what looks like the edge of a forest to the west, and a mountain that seems to have suffered a rockslide recently directly north.

Everything else for as far as he can see looks as dead and bare as the valley he just climbed out of.

Three directions, three choices. It reminds him of those choose-your-own-adventure novels he read as a kid, or one of those old video games.

_You find yourself in a dark room…_

He was always terrible at those. Always got himself eaten by a troll or something.

“I don’t suppose,” he says out loud to the mysterious silence in his ear, “That you have any input on which direction I should take.”

As expected, he gets no reply.

“Eh, worth a shot,” he mutters, scanning the three sites repeatedly.

He’s got good eyesight, but a pair of binoculars or a scope or something usually played a role in long-range spotting training. Wherever he went, he needs to make a decision and stick to it, fast. The sun is setting and his hands are already turning bright red and stiff from the cold.

The forest is too far away anyway, he doubts he’d make it there by sundown, and if there’s going to be fucking wolves or grenade tripwires or that shit anywhere, they’ll be there, and he’d rather not deal with that yet.

That leaves the stream and the mountain. The setup on the thicket is almost fucking textbook for the survival training they’ve had, and he doesn’t trust it a bit. Again, he comes back to the rockslide, and feels weirdly drawn to it. If nothing else, the boulders should offer some protection from the wind or any attacks in the night.

Mind made up, he starts down the hill, heading north.

He keeps a steady jog, pacing himself and trying to get his blood pumping again. He’s fighting the adrenaline crash from the fucking helicopter stunt, and the wind and cold are starting to get unpleasantly friendly with his extremities already.

It takes him twenty minutes to make it to the rockslide, carefully pacing himself avoid breaking a sweat. Dehydration’s going to be enough of a bitch to avoid the next few days without making it worse on himself.

As he gets closer though, he’s able to realize what drew him this way in particular.  The edges of the rock are jagged and don’t adhere to a standard pattern. What’s more, he they don’t break along the natural fault lines of the sedimentary rock, but rather across some of them.

Not a natural rockslide then. Definitely Man-made, using explosives.

He slows to a halt a distance from the newly created cliff-face, wary of destabilizing any Indiana Jones-style boulders that might still be teetering, whether by accident or malicious design.

There’s no lingering trace of explosives or dust in the air, so this must have been prepared at least a couple of months ago. Moss has started to grow back over the mountainside as well, creeping up a couple inches from the soggy ground, as if offended that something in this godforsaken place dares not to be _thoroughly_ damp.

Nothing to indicate there's been anyone here for weeks then, no footprints or crumpled cigs or ammo shells. He's almost jogged the circumference of the hill and given up towards the creek when he sees it. There, on a boulder that rests against the side of the mountain: a patch of dirt about 6 centimeters across where the new moss has been knocked off. Scuffed by the side a boot, most like.

Cautiously, he approaches the crevice, stiff fingers flexing around the pocketknife up his sleeve, ready for anything or nothing.

" _Fuck!_ JB!"

A low whine comes piteously from the dark, where his poor fucking dog is shivering miserably. His collar is gone, replaced by a thin rope around his neck tied to a stake in the ground.

A low burst of anger runs through Eggsy at the sight, but it's immediately pushed aside in favor of pulling JB free and out from his hiding spot as quickly as possible. Stiff hands rub quickly across short fur, friction doing its best to restore bloodflow in both of them.

JB is whimpering now, gratefully trying to lick at red fingers as they rub sensation back into his ears. Eggsy pulls back reluctantly, not willing to let the dog waste precious saliva on him when neither of them had the water to replace it.

Shit. His job description for the next four days and nights now includes keeping a shivering, short-haired, honestly-somewhat-spoiled lap dog alive and healthy in the middle of a Scottish winter.

He pulls JB up and under his shirt and new sweater in a familiar motion, lashing the rope he'd pulled from his neck around his waist and the still-slightly-shivering-damn-it form pressed to his chest.

Comforted by the familiar weight and body heat, he sighs and taps his earpiece. "Target located and acquired."

 

* * *

 

Two hours later, the sun has set properly and Eggsy's fairly happy with his progress.

He's set up camp by the creek, a good quarter mile from the 'suspiciously perfect' site to a more 'reasonably acceptable' one. JB is huddled under the shelter he'd build by stretching the plastic sheet low to the ground between a log and a pair of river rocks, burrowing into the insulating but still bloody damp layer of grasses and moss on the ground.

Eggsy is stoking the fire he's finally gotten to catch and continuing to natter on into his earpiece as he has been for the last forty-five minutes.

"Look, again, I saw the reflection from your scope at sunset, yeah? It was a pretty fuckin' obvious hiding spot, and if there was the possibility o' it bein' anyone else in this shithole of a barren waste I woulda done somethin' about it, but I'm fuckin' tired, and part of this test is s'posed to be my conservin' energy, so I still think you should just gimme this one and come down here for the night. Otherwise I'm just gonna hafta track your sorry arse down in the mornin' when I'd really rather find some fuckin' food, yeah?'

"Laziness really does not become a gentleman, Eggsy."

Eggsy spun around at the familiar voice, and smirked. "You took an extra half an hour just so you could sneak up on me, didn't ya?"

Harry sets down a duffel bag, and sinks to his knees next to him, rifling through it.

"It's nice to see you too, Eggsy. I must say I've never heard of anyone sucessfully annoying their handler into delivering themselves to a candidate before. You should be commended on your creativity if nothing else."

"Fuck off, is that a thermos?"

**Author's Note:**

> JESUS this first chapter was like pulling teeth to write but I have such clear vision for later parts I just had to get it out and I might rewrite the whole thing later anyway.
> 
> Find me on Tumblr as thealexandriaarchives. Nagging there actually does encourage me to write.
> 
> This fic is Unbeta'ed and Moderately WIP. Reviews are adored like nothing else.


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